This ain’t your Ground of Being

Sophisticated Theologians™ tell us that God is indescribable, that he’s “outside of space and time,” a Being Whereof We Cannot Speak, a “ground of being”—anything but a humanoid being. Well, for most believers that’s not true.

I’ll quote here from the book I’m reading, When God Talks Back, by Tanya Luhrmann, which is an anthropological study of an evangelical Christian sect: not an ultra-loony one, but one that comprises intelligent and well-off people (one branch Luhrmann studied is right here in Hyde Park, Chicago).

Luhrmann describes the very personal relationship that members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship have with God. They talk to him constantly, pray with him, and one even has “dates” with him, sitting on a park bench and imagining Jesus sitting next to her with his arm around her and chatting. Why, one person even pulls out a chair at breakfast and pours God a hot cup of coffee, conversing with the imaginary deity as if he were right there with the java!

The whole nature of God for these people (and for many, many Americans) is that of a personal God, something with the characteristics of a human. To deny the ubiquity of this concept of God belies profound ignorance of religion. Either many theologians are ignorant in that way, or simply feel that such people have wrong belief.

“It’s really important to understand that God is not an impersonal force. Even though He is invisible, God is personal and He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, he hears, he feels and he speaks.”

creepy “They talk to him constantly, pray with him, and one even has “dates” with him, sitting on a park bench and imagining Jesus sitting next to her with his arm around her and chatting.”

well that explains the disturbing Christian songs that are nothing more than poorly written pop love songs. It’s also a great window into the minds of people who think that god approves of all they do and agrees with all of their hatreds and desires.

Maybe so — though the two of you seem awfully interested in the thickness of the guys’ veils.

No denying that what you’re suggesting exists, but there may be a (small “p”) platonic explanation, too: For some of these folks — particularly the ones trapped in the economically strapped neck of the woods where “they cling to guns and religion” — God probably seems to be in the shrinking pool of grown-up English-speaking white guys they still have left around to talk to.

Andrew Newberg, etal in Why God Won’t Go Away, says that the area of the brain that lights up during sex is the same part that lights up in religious ecstasy. So, religious fervor = sexual passion. Bottom line: they want to have an affair with Daddy.

The brain/mind is so unfathomably complex, it is a disservice to make generalized comparisons and then arrive at some “deeper” social conclusions. Read up on the Amygdala to get a flavor of just one complex region:

My aunt, the nun, tells a story of a convent who talk about jesus, their husband, as if he is in the next room. Just around the corner and about to walk in. Very creepy. She’s a catholic nun and more sophisticated in her belief so she looks down on those ideas.
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As god gets more abstract and unknowable, one begins to naturally wonder why he is worth worshiping. He gets so unknowable that agnosticism becomes a real live option that it wasn’t before for many people. As he gets more like us, it again begins hard to see why he is worthy of worship. This is a real dilemma–no one ever suggests some midpoint that is acceptably knowable and acceptably worshipable. I think that many xians, even the ones like Luhrmann studies, trade on these options, different conceptions for different conversations. When you need god to be knowable, use it. When you don’t, don’t. It’s part of the inherent slipperiness of the whole idiotic idea.

“Either many theologians are ignorant in that way, or simply feel that such people have wrong belief.”

Classic response of the religious when confronted; the ‘no true Scotsman’ ploy. Someone recently tried telling me about all the horrible things done in the name of atheism by people such as Stalin. When I pointed out that Stalin had a religious upbringing this was dismissed as irrelevant as ‘The Russian Orthodox lot don’t count.’

I generally agree with the religious that it was Stalin’s atheism that led to the purges. If only he had abandoned his atheism and welcomed the loving embrace of the great god Quetzalcoatl we would have been spared the horror!

With Stalin, Hitler, the North Korean dictators, Pol Pot, and even the recently deposed Saddam Hussein, there was such an incredible syncophancy and reinforcement around such authoritarians, that the dictators themselves took on deistic beliefs and tendencies. God on Earth, and visible! Saddam Hussein increasingly (so reported) felt more and more immortal, which explains his dismissal of life in exile. The late “Dear Leader” in North Korea was described in newspapers as “never having the necessity for a bowel movement.”

The religious-like fervor surrounding these dictators might as well be defined as a religion (e.g. Hitler claimed to receive hundreds of thousands of letters in 1933, each month). It certainly follows then, to look at all the slaughter brought down in the Old Testament??!! Certainly, it is the moral obligation of Him shepherding the Chosen People, to destroy those who would defy the Lord.

As I’ve said before, IMHO it is severity of punishment for apostasy that defines whether an ideology is a religion or simply a social club. Solzhenitsyn describes (apocryphally) the man he met in the Gulag, who was incarcerated there because he was the first to stop clapping after a Stalin speech.

Some of those Vineyard people live near us. They are truly scary. Or maybe I should say ‘scared,’ because I believe people who aren’t very bright are afraid of just about everything, and they look for easy answers in the form of an all-knowing, all-seeing Daddy.

The willingness and desire of people to put themselves under an invisible authoritarian figure is a scary psychological construct. What’s worse is that these same people will follow despots and dictators without question.

Frightening, isn’t it. Some people believe we are lumbering robots controlled by our genes. And get this, some even think it’s an entity called Lossoff Fissicks who pulls the strings. When will we ever be set free?

Don’t imagine that this is something specific to this one sect either. All the believers I grew up with and know from a different fairly large U.S. denomination are like this. While I’ve never known anyone to go on a “date” with God all the rest sounds perfectly ordinary to me, as newsworthy as “the sky is blue” or “the sun is hot”. I have no idea what Sophisticated Theologians think of these believers, but I know what most of these believers think of Sophisticated Theologians: they are heretics.

This is important to remember because a lot of effort spent trying to engage the arguments and ideas of Sophisticated Theologians is wasted, because that’s not really what the people in the pews believe.

The “sophisticated” theologians are presenting gods that no christian I’ve met believe in. All the christians I have met think that their gods are very personal and interactive. I’ve even met a couple that think the whole universe was created for them personally to gain experience for an after death mission they are preparing for. All other animals including humans are just puppets in the exercise. Christians would be hilariously funny if they weren’t so destructive.

There’s also a fourth option: theologians believe in a God that’s enigmatic and mysterious AND they believe in the same anthropomorphic deity that every other believer does.

But how? How can they believe two completely opposing things at the same time?

Theologians believe belief is enigmatic and mysterious. Believing in opposites? There’s a miracle in that. Faith itself is a miracle.

And then they’ll make an inappropriate and sloppy analogy to something ambiguous which looks like it’s a contradiction if you don’t think too hard about it and go “see…?” like they’ve proven they’re not doing anything unusual, anyway.

Yeah, that is probably likely too. I do remember hearing something similar from a theologian – that while God is this infinitely mysterious and enigmatic ineffable transcendental grounding of being, it’s both a convenience and somewhat accurate to explain God in terms of the personal theism that we’re used to.

It does come down to a matter of faith – which is the standard atheist objection to a belief in God – but it doesn’t stop the absurdity of looking at it as an outsider. It’s not only nonsense, it’s unintelligible nonsense!

Some work done by Justin Barrett is interesting in this respect. Barrett designed some experiments intended to distinguish between what people claimed to believe about God and how they actually thought about God when reasoning about religious matters. It turns out that while people may claim to believe, for example, that God was omnipotent and omnipresent, in practice they assume that he can assist only one person at a time. This leads to what Boyer calls “the tragedy of the theologian”: whatever sophisticated notions theologians may develop about God, in practice people keep thinking about God in the same old, anthropomorphic way.

For some believers it is both things at a time, depending on whom they’re speaking with. If they’re speaking with an atheist, God is an ineffable Force at which you arrive only by examining things like the regularity of the creative love of the cosmos and the objective truth of moral reality; then, the christian turns around towards his parishioners and tells them to open their psalms book at page 23897 and pray for Baby Jesus.

I would dearly love to see an interview with a player from a team that just lost the big game saying, “I just wanna say, “F*&k Jesus! We prayed our asses off and he totally screwed us over. Our opponents are a bunch of godless heathens and Jesus didn’t give a shit. What an asshole.”

@clubschadenfreude: “It’s also a great window into the minds of people who think that god approves of all they do and agrees with all of their hatreds and desires.”

Perzackly. Do you ever meet a believer who says, “Damn, god wants me to do/say/believe/vote other than how I want to. I’d better change”? I’m not saying it *never* happens, but anyone who has been in an evangelical/fundamentalist church for awhile knows that it certainly isn’t very common. This lines up perfectly with the old saw that “the bible is full of good things that other people should do,” as seen in the religious right’s focus on things they personally don’t do (here one might want to contrast how often Jebus spoke against homosexuality vs. how often he spoke about the danger of riches).

@Ceiling Cat: “Tebow 1, Kierkegaard 0.” While I understand the sentiment, I’d only score it like that if said personal god actually existed. Since these people are putatively having a personal relationship with a non-existent being, which strikes me as some kind of neurosis, I’d score it as “Tebow -1, Kierkegaard 0.”

@corio37: “Julian Baggini wrote a whole series of articles about this, finishing with the astounding (to him) conclusion that yes, Christians REALLY DO believe all this crap.”

But, that is the whole point. I certainly believed it during my period of dementia. And didn’t Sam Harris point out that the reason why certain muslims flew planes into the WTC was precisely *because* they believed what their religion teaches, and that that is a much more parsimonious explanation than the ones the media was trying to come up with for why people practicing a peaceful religion would do such a thing? As was remarked by several others above, this is scary.

The thing that struck me was this sentence,”He knows, he hears, he feels and he speaks.”

I wonder in what sense they think “he feels.” Obviously, they haven’t given it much thought. Certainly, a deity, supernatural being, or omnipresent force would have no use for typical senses such as sight, touch, or taste. The other interpretation is that this deity feels emotion? That would be truly scary. Of course it would explain a lot of the scriptures that describe the anger, jealousy, revenge, etc.

I’m thinking, “That’s great, they worship a god that would benefit from Lithium.”

You’ve finally hit on the explanation for why descriptions of The Hereafter sound so much like a Lithium trance.

Maybe they keep a dosed salt lick in the middle of the joint so all the saints and all the angels and all the dieties can just help themselves whenever they start contemplating the implications of spending Eternity there together.

At Landover Baptist’s web site you can get “Jesus is watching you masturbate” and “Jesus is watching you fornicate” bumper stickers. The implications of omniscience are, shall we say, not fully realized by believers.

“That God is a person, yet one without a body, seems the most elementary claim of theism. It is by being told this or something that entails this (e.g. that God always listens to and sometimes grants us our prayers, he has plans for us, he forgives our sins, but he does not have a body) that young children are introduced to the concept of God.”

I can feel their loneliness Quote “It’s really important to understand that God is not an impersonal force. Even though He is invisible, God is personal and He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, he hears, he feels and he speaks.” The imaginary friend is very common in children and it is supposedly helpful in the learning of language. But meeting Jesus in the park? Going out on an imaginary date? How sad.

How could a bodiless person without any sense organs perceive anything?
Knowledge is a dispositional mental state. But where and how could a bodiless person store any knowledge or memories when it lacks any such thing as a neural hardware?

“Much of the difficulty with talk of God likewise derives from our insistence in making him in our likeness, and so attributing to him a mind, and even a personality—everything except the body needed to give it all sense.”

(Rundle, Bede. Why there is Something rather than Nothing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 12-3)

Knowledge is ultimately memory. That is the great problem in every avenue, with theology. Memory, until the 19th Century, was the province of metaphysics, and “science, do not come near…this is strictly soul and religion.”

So, if there is some deity, how are its memories first generated, then stored? Model please!